Word: utterings
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...deterrent. In 1786, the Philadelphia Quakers established incarceration as a humane alternative. Seeking penitence (source of "penitentiary"), the Quakers locked convicts in solitary cells until death or release. So many died or went insane that in 1825 New York's Auburn Prison introduced hard labor-in utter silence. Until quite recently, the U.S. relied almost entirely on the spirit-breaking Auburn system of shaved heads, lock-step marching and degrading toil in huge, costly, isolated cages that soothed the public's fear of escapes...
Four Myths. The heart of the classic western, says Fiedler, lies in the encounter between White Man and Red Man, "that utter stranger for whom our New World is an Old Home." In the model western, the meeting either changes the White Man into the kind of cultural half-breed typified by James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, or results in the destruction of the Indian...
What Morse describes as "the long chain of apathy" at State was finally broken in late 1943, when Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. submitted an angry report to Franklin Roosevelt. The report charged the State Department with "utter failure to prevent the extermination of Europe's Jews," and strongly suggested that its inaction was either "deliberate" or due to the "incompetence" of certain officers. Roosevelt responded by establishing the independent War Refugee Board, which helped bring thousands of Jews to the U.S. from neutral countries-but only, says Morse, after "millions had perished...
...grossest excesses." It was a brilliant, unpartisan, vindictive selection. Charles de Gaulle was there, of course, along with Mao and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The 1967 football season, hanging on "like a summer cold," qualified. So did Jacqueline Kennedy magazine covers and the movie Casino Royale, "the utter boring vacuity of the put-on carried to excess." Among gross literary excesses there was, happily, Marshall McLuhan's "losing battle with the English language," and The Story of O, "unarguably the dullest dirty book ever written."* Finally, there were all the "Ins" (the bein, the kissin, the wedin...
Massachusetts politicians often talk about something which they call "the system"--the unwritten, rigid rules which govern life up on Beacon Hill. White's ultimatum was in utter defiance of "the system." Indeed, "the system" decreed that the price White would probably have to pay for his interference with the legislative process would be the scuttling of legislation that he might propose as Mayor of Boston. The risk was a great one but White probably realized or at least sensed the sharpness of Davoren's desire to replace him and also sensed Quinn's quietly seething ambition to become Speaker...